#E0025 Editorial: Emerging issues in the occupational health field
Journaling the latest findings on environmental and occupational health issues and practices
The Environmental and Occupational Health Practice (EOH-P) journal was launched in 2019. It is the second international journal by the Japan Society for Occupational Health and is sister to the Journal of Occupational Health (JOH). The goal of EOH-P is to help occupational health practitioners with practical information on the latest developments in their field.
Occupational health is a field that heavily relies on good or best practices. However, knowledge derived from such practices is often not published in journals because articles that contain them are seldom cited. Most journals are far too preoccupied with their impact scores to publish articles that are not cited by other journals. This is the gap that EOH-P seeks to fill. It aims to publish reports that contain local and real-world knowledge to provide occupational health practitioners with genuine empirical value, which cannot be found in other journals.
EOH-P also hopes to actively discuss important local and global issues in the field of occupational health. Some of these issues are difficult to study because they require extensive designs or there is hardly any data available. For instance, it’s difficult to study the effects of dual employment or overemployment on the health of poor workers because occupational injuries or illnesses are rarely captured by official data. EOH-P encourages early-stage research on such topics, no matter how small-scale they may be, to bring these issues into the limelight and critically discuss them.
Apart from Occupational Health, EOH-P also reports on old and new environmental issues like the alarming levels of toxic substances in our natural and urban environments. It throws light on hidden issues like those faced by workers in developing countries and aims to solve these by providing real and useful data.
Finally, EOH-P lays great emphasis on the development and usage of tools for occupational safety and health (OSH) activities. It provides a platform for exploratory research which details new initiatives, methodologies, and expansion and adjustment tactics that may have a bearing on actual work practices. Due to the journal’s high regard for the rigors of methodology and soundness of interpretations, EOH-P supports the publication of all findings, including the discouraging, negative, and the non-significant ones.
Occupational health practitioners face numerous challenges daily. They need to educate themselves and innovate to solve these challenges. Both the JOH and EOH-P are attempts to help them in this endeavor by gathering and sharing knowledge that has high practical relevance.
Link to the original journal article:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/eohp/2/1/2_2.1-ED/_article
Title of the paper:
Emerging issues in the occupational health field
Authors:
Akizumi Tsutsumi
